Bill Cohan, Columnist

Is Wall Street Killing Its Bankers?

Do the sudden deaths of young men in finance mean the already-difficult job of working on Wall Street has gotten even tougher in the aftermath of the financial crisis?

May 9, 2014 at 11:03 AM UTC

By Bill Cohan

William D. Cohan, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of the forthcoming "The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities," as well as "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and the New York Times best-sellers "House of Cards" and "The Last Tycoons." Cohan is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes frequently for the Financial Times, Fortune, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He worked on Wall Street as a senior mergers and acquisitions banker for 15 years. He also worked for two years at GE Capital. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and Columbia University Graduate School of Business. "The Last Tycoons" won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Wall Street can be an unforgiving workplace. Photographer: Timothy Clary/AFP/Getty Images — Wall Street can be an unforgiving workplace. Photographer: Timothy Clary/AFP/Getty Images

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It’s probably just a sad coincidence, but the sudden deaths since December of a group of young men who worked for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (or who once did) have conspiracy theorists in a tizzy.

For the less conspiracy-minded, the deaths again raise a troubling question: Is the already-difficult job of working in finance even tougher in the aftermath of the financial crisis? Having worked on Wall Street, I can attest to how demanding the hours are. (Disclosure: I lost an arbitration case against JPMorgan Chase over my dismissal, and I am now involved in litigation against the bank on a separate matter.)